Hilary Mantel has already won the Man Booker and Costa prizes for Bring Up the Bodies. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

At 20 titles, the Women's prize longlist casts its net wide. The final half-dozen, by contrast, make up a list short on surprises: five of the authors are already big-hitters in anyone's book. Kate Atkinson may be best known for her quirky detective novels, but has an impressive literary pedigree dating back to her dazzling first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum; AM Homes is an essential modern American author; Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver are past winners of the prize in its Orange incarnation and Hilary Mantel has already won everything else. The wild card is the US author Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette – a zany black comedy about stifled creativity and maternal mixed feelings which balances scabrous wit with sentiment.

But if the list is predictable, the books are not. Smith's fractured meditation on contemporary London and Atkinson's stop-start narration of a woman's multiple lives in a changing England are deep, playful experimental novels that have won wild praise but also divided critics. Kingsolver's book tackles climate change with biblical force. Mantel's all-conquering Bring Up the Bodies is an extraordinary achievement. And Homes and Semple both cut to the heart of the American dream and the modern family with no-holds-barred dark comedy.

I don't see a title left languishing on the longlist that should have made the final six, though I'm delighted that the original inclusion of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl made the case for her as a literary stylist as well as a superb thriller writer. The Mantel issue, though, remains. If she triumphs in June, she will become the first person to win all three of the UK's major book prizes; if not, the decision will be reported as a snub to a book that was the Man Booker and Costa choice. In that sense, the judges can't win. But they have six marvellous books in front of them, with titles strong enough and different enough from Mantel's Tudor colossus to offer a valid alternative. I'm hoping for Atkinson – she's a novelist worth celebrating , who has written the most interesting book of her career. Should Bring Up the Bodies do the triple, it will remain a fantastic novel, however much praise it gets. Justine Jordan is the Guardian's deputy literary editor